Nutblocker.com recently relaunched, and I wrote a couple of PLO8 guides for them. The guide will be released in multiple parts, and the first one was just released. It felt good to back to writing about poker but its nice to have it done. The content is new and its free.  Check it out here: http://www.nutblocker.com/article/220/beguinner-guide-to-plo-8-part-1-introduction.html

Since black Friday I haven’t exactly played a ton of poker. I’ve played enough on Merge to stay reasonably sharp, although given the options available to US players right now I play pretty much for recreation. The stakes are too low, there are too few games, and cashouts are too difficult to play to make money. But I still love the game and am glad there are still some opportunities to play.

While there aren’t as many PLO8 games available as their used to be, the good news is the ones that exist are still juicy. I’m working on a series of blog posts on PLO8 strategy that will be coming out soon. While people seemed to enjoy the travel related posts, this is a PLO8 blog afterall and I’m going to start refreshing the content. I may also make some short (~10 min videos). In the meantime here’s an example of how good the games can be right now. The villain in this hand was playing 90% of his hands, so J235ss was probably the top of his range:

Table info:

tattaa ($97.50)

Posts small blind $0.25

jusaplayer ($53.31)

Posts big blind $0.50

BullyPoker77 ($40.17)

Slick10ten10 ($22.24)

MichaelBluth ($51.40)

IrIdEpArKcItY ($32.50)

Dealer

Check odds

Preflop: (Pot: $0.75)

MichaelBluth’s cards:

BullyPoker77 calls ($.50)

Slick10ten10 raises to ($2.25)

MichaelBluth calls ($2.25)

IrIdEpArKcItY calls ($2.25)

tattaa folds

jusaplayer folds

BullyPoker77 calls ($1.75)

Check odds

Flop: (Pot: $9.75)

BullyPoker77 checks

Slick10ten10 bets ($9.75)

MichaelBluth raises to ($39)

IrIdEpArKcItY folds

BullyPoker77 folds

Slick10ten10 calls ($10.24)

Check odds

Turn: (Pot: $68.74)

River: (Pot: $68.74)

Showdown:

Slick10ten10 shows:

MichaelBluth shows:

MichaelBluth wins the pot of ($47.25 )

Any fear I may have had of food with the head on it was long gone by this point.

This was “black chicken”. It was supposed to be a delicacy, but I ended up not trying it. The reason wasn’t because it was gross, but someone ordered it at the end of the meal and I was already stuffed. I still don’t understand why anyone would want the beaks and feet left on their food.

I’m not exactly a big fan of Chairman Mao, but I wanted to get my picture taken in front of his statue at the Bund.

One the more interesting experiences was eating at a Thai restaurant in Shanghai that had a teddy bear theme, and  the option to “Build a Bear”. Teddy Bear Thai is a pretty bizarre restaurant concept, but the food was delicious.

An alley where you can reach up and grab the power lines if you want to:

I stayed at the Intercontinental, which was amazing. It was the equivalent of about 120 USD per night, and the quality was on par with a 6 star hotel I stayed at once in Aspen.

The only downside to the trip was trying to get the hell out of the Shanghai airport. Our flight got canceled and I ended up having to stay another night. Long story short the experience in the airport was very frustrating, and I ended up spending 3 hours in line to get another flight. Then the next morning when I came back it turned out I didn’t really have another flight and I spend about another 4 hours in lines until I could get out. If you thought United was bad in the US, you should try United in China……

My family wanted to me to bring some stuff back, so we started out at Stanley Market to do some shopping and then grabbed dinner.

There was a nice little beach area next to the market.

The person I was travelling with had a friend from grad school who lives in Hong Kong. It was cool to have a local to help show us around. She took us to a restaurant for hot pot. I had never heard of that before but it ended up being delicious. Its kind of like fondue but with meat and shrimp and noodles and other stuff. No one there spoke English and the menu was all in Chinese and didn’t have pictures, so there was no way we could have eaten there with a local.

The next day we took a huge cable car to the giant Buddha. The sign said the it was a 60 minute wait but we decided to go for it anyway. They were a little bit off on their timing and it ended up taking 2 1/2 hours Needless to say I was pretty unhappy. They even did the Disney style thing with the line where it looks like you’re almost there and then you turn a corner and there is another massive line. Some of the signs were pretty funny though. No livestock permitted on the cable car…..

The cable car ride was about 30 minutes, and it had some absolutely huge spans between the supports.

It was worth the wait though, the Buddha was pretty amazing:

Every religion is required to have a donation box. But I think if they really wanted apples they would have made the slot bigger.

Hong Kong at night. We checked out the waterfront and had an awesome steak dinner at Morton’s.

Had to check out the Walk of Fame and the Bruce Lee statue!

Then went to the night market to buy more stuff for my kids. Also had to pick up a Mao/Obama shirt for my Dad to tilt him a little.

Did a little bar hopping as well:

Obviously I didn’t take pictures of the business meetings, but they went well and I learned a lot. I have one more part for this trip report, which will be Shanghai.

Singapore

Getting to Singapore is a pretty long trip. First I had to go from Denver to San Francisco which isn’t too bad. The next leg from to Hong Kong, which was a 14 hour flight. When I booked the trip I had window seats the whole way. As I was boarding I realized they had stuck me in a middle seat. The realization that I was going to spend 14 hours in a coach middle seat on a full flight was a pretty big soul crush. It turns out my company’s travel software lets you pick seats, but that info never registers with the airline. That’s pretty retarded, but I guess I know for next time. Fortunately I was seated to 2 small people and I had a neck pillow so it wasn’t a big deal. After a short layover it took another couple hour flight to make it the rest of the way to Singapore. I think the total travel from my house to the hotel was over 24 hours. Yikes!

One of the advantages of corporate travel is they tend to put you up in nice places. I stayed in the Pan Pacific. Someone I didn’t know about Asia is they like to have the shower visible from the bed. This came in handy because I could watch the World Series at 9am while in the shower. But I’m pretty sure that isn’t the intended purpose of the open shower. I guess you can lay in bed while watching your woman wash her mysterious lady parts. That’s seems kind of weird, but whatever turns people on I guess……

One of the great things about this trip was in every city we met up with a local person from the company. They all wanted to take us to their favorite local places to eat, so we were able to get well out of the business and tourist areas. Singapore is known for its food and I got the chance to try their pepper crab and chili crab:

The only problem for me is I’ve had stomach problems since I was a teenager, so if I eat anything remotely spicy I can have issues. I enjoyed the meal but I woke up that nice with some pretty vicious heartburn.

I’m not going to go into detail about the business meetings, but I learned a lot and met some interesting people. There wasn’t really any time to do touristy stuff, although we did take a stroll through China town and another part of the city. Next time I go back I hope to get a chance to stop at some of the museums. I’m a huge history buff and would have loved to check out some of the WWII exhibits. I did walk past this memorial, but that was about it:

On the next post I’ll talk about Hong Kong.

Lately I started playing on Carbon Poker again. I did a cashout a month ago, but after the transaction still showing ‘pending’ and Carbon not responding to emails I figured I may as well cancel it and have some fun with my play money. I’m really disgusted at the state of online poker in the US and can’t wait for the day when we get regulation and I can play on MGM.com.

Basically it is the PLO8 Revealed book on an iPhone. There will also be an iPad app pretty soon. In addition to having the book content, there are some training videos embedded into the app. I also do a brief audio intro to each chapter.

In the future I think we’ll see more poker apps like this. At this point its pretty unique and there aren’t many poker training apps in the  iTunes store.  Poker training has evolved a lot over the years. Originally it was books, and then training sites (like Cardrunners), and then you began to see a lot of private coaching. I think apps will be the next big innovation in training. This app is a book with a few extra features, but I’m sure over time these apps will evolve quite a bit. Please check it out and let me know what you think.

Between my corporate job, family, working out, golf, and a side business (not poker related) I’ve been working on getting started, and a little bit of options trading, I haven’t had a ton of free time. This season I’ve really re-devoted myself to golf.  I’ve taken 3 lessons this summer, and my swing is getting a lot better. I have a 1 handicap, and really want to finally get it to scratch. The guy I’m taking lessons from is a total badass. He qualified for the US Open at Pebble last year and made the cut. He has the rare combo of being about to play and teach golf at a super high level. I signed up for a tournament that takes place in a few weeks. I used to play a ton of tournaments, and since kids I think I’ve only played one. Next year I want to play a bunch, so I thought it would be a good idea to get at least 1 in this year.

I’m not going to go into detail, but my job has been pretty awesome. After investing all of the time and money into the MBA its nice to see it paying off. There is also the possiblity I’ll get to travel to Hong Kong and Singapore in October. Look for some cool pictures if that happens.

That’s all I have time for right now. Look for me to get back to weekly updates and more poker content.